In a wild flight of fancy, he led his story with a genetic link between Glenn Curtiss’ pioneering hydroplane, which flew into history on San Diego Bay in 1911, and its Navy offspring — planes such as the Hellcat, the Corsair and the Skystreak, which had recently clocked the world speed record.

Throughout the piece, my father referred to the Curtiss aircraft as “Pa” and speculated that the plane’s spirit was “hop, skipping and jumping about the Bay, looking down in ghostly omnipresence as the City honors the fleet and his sons.”

I recall this obscure scrap of family lore for two reasons.

First, to plug my late father, a newspaperman from Kansas City, Mo., who often said his years at the penurious Journal were the happiest, if poorest, of his life.

Second, to start making the point that newspapers, in the vein of my dad’s loopy aviation conceit, are part of a continuum that reaches back into the 19th century when wandering wordsmiths lugged presses to frontier towns, rolled up sleeves and reported the news.

They came and went, these broadsheets bordered with ads. In a 150-year-long process of natural selection, they’ve died to enrich the DNA of the last full-service daily standing in San Diego.

In the past few weeks, the newly named U-T San Diego and the 17-year-old North County Times, itself an amalgam of two century-old newspaper rivals, have been reconstituted as the only, and likely the last, print daily in the region.

It seems fitting, then, to honor those papers, great and small, that look down in ghostly omnipresence at the paper you’re holding in your hand.

Or, it must be added, scanning on a screen.

•••

Let’s jump back to the Civil War and skip our way forward.

Consider yourself warned: I’m not a historian, not even close. Like my dad, I’m a newspaperman with a certain number of column inches to file on deadline. My research, if you can call it that, is cursory, slapdash, a far cry from scholarship.

Still, I know where to begin. And where to end. And that’s a start.

In the city of San Diego, the first stab at a local newspaper proved a false start. The pro-slavery weekly San Diego Herald had its day in the 1850s but the Civil War — and commercial somnolence — sent it packing.

By 1868, the time was ripe. Alonzo Horton was buying up bayside land for 30 cents an acre. San Diego dreamed of being the terminus for a southern intercontinental railroad. San Diego thirsted for a newspaper to build a sense of civic destiny.

On Oct. 10, 1868, working out of a tiny building in Old Town, editor Jeff Gatewood saluted the readers of The San Diego Union with a brave, if somewhat hackneyed, promise:

“The Union will be a faithful mirror, reflecting from its pages times of distress as well as of prosperity — hopes and fears, gloom and gayety and smiles and tears. A faithful chronicler of today and a future reliable historian of the past.”

Gatewood pledged that the Union — the paper’s name repeated the principal fighting word of the Civil War — would lead “the grand struggle for the improvement of Southern California — in opening the way for the march of civilization.”

The Union was destined to be the seminal “Pa” of San Diego journalism. In three years, it was humming along, hawking daily editions.

Competition soon showed up in the form of the Daily Bee, which The San Diego Union Co. duly purchased in 1889, renaming the new paper The San Diego Union and Daily Bee, a forced fusing of names, resources, circulation and advertising inches that in the newspaper business has become a Darwinian fact of life.

Shortly after the purchase of the Bee, John D. Spreckels, a Hawaii sugar baron of Rockefellerian wealth and ambition, bought the dominant morning daily.

The San Diego Evening Tribune, an upstart daily founded in 1895, succumbed to Spreckels in 1901, creating a durable two-pronged business model. The morning and afternoon papers competed for readers and advertisers, but they shared resources, including buildings and presses. Bottom line, their profits went to the Spreckels bottom line.

It’s hard to imagine today how totally Spreckels dominated San Diego. He owned the biggest newspapers, the Hotel del Coronado, most of Coronado, ferries, rail, a water company, downtown buildings.

The old joke went that a mother and her daughter were walking and every time they came to anything of value, the girl would ask her mother who owned it and the answer was always “Mr. Spreckels.” When they came to the ocean, the girl asked the same question and the mother said that God owns the ocean. “So Mr. Spreckels didn’t want it?” the girl said.

In a comprehensive, but unpublished, history of the Union, the late Al JaCoby, a longtime Union editor, wrote: “No civic event, no municipal improvement, nothing, happened in San Diego without the approval and support of John Diedrich Spreckels.”

In 1892, the San Diego Sun, founded in 1881, was purchased by E.W. Scripps. Though San Diego struck Scripps as “a busted, broken-down boom town, probably more difficult of access than any other spot in the whole country,” Scripps and his formidable sister, Ellen Browning Scripps, found the out-of-the-way coastal semidesert a salve for the soul. E.W. Scripps not only ruled the San Diego Sun but also 8,000 acres of the San Diego earth — Miramar Ranch. Both E.W. and Ellen proved to be major philanthropists in their adopted hometown. As a biographer put it, “They did not move to San Diego to make a fortune but to give one away.”

As fate would have it, Spreckels and Scripps, bitter enemies in print and in mortal flesh, both died in 1926.

Two years later, Ira Copley, a wealthy utility and newspaper owner from Illinois, came out of retirement to buy the Union and the Tribune.

Complicating the market at the time was the San Diego Independent, an eccentric paper founded in 1924 as a reaction to what publisher Franklin Schroeder saw as a sordid level of local journalism.

In an early Independent editorial, Schroeder wrote: “The child in your home should never learn the secrets of life through the columns of this newspaper.”

In 1928, the Independent died in Copley’s monopolizing arms. Eleven years later, in 1939, the Sun fell, too, but not without leaving a brilliant legacy.

Magner White, then a 29-year-old Sun reporter, had won the 1924 Pulitzer Prize, the first from a writer west of the Mississippi, for a feature story on a solar eclipse that read like great fiction (and in part probably was).

Also adding to the Sun’s brilliance was the meteoric success of Max Miller, whose 1932 memoir, “I Cover the Waterfront,” became a noirish movie and the title of a moody Billie Holiday classic.

Acknowledging the luminosity of the Sun’s brand, Copley renamed his monopoly afternoon paper The San Diego Tribune-Sun.

Before World War II ended, however, a new daily threw its press hat in the ring, a Democratic challenger to the rock-ribbed Republican empire of the Copleys.

The Daily Journal, like the Sun an incubator for talent (Lionel Van Deerlin, Eileen Jackson, Fred Kinne and Neil Morgan among them), had a memorable, but short, run.

The Journal gave up its liberal ghost in 1950, merging with the Tribune-Sun.

Evidently figuring three names was one too many, Jim Copley, who had taken over as publisher from his late father, revived the old name: Evening Tribune.

The monopoly of the city of San Diego was complete. Beyond the city lines, however, was a world not so easily conquered.

In East County, the Daily Californian was fighting for readers and ad dollars against San Diego’s dailies.

And up north, a press war was brewing that, you might say, has ended today.

•••

In North County, far from

the madding circulation area of San Diego, the presses have been running for 126 years.

On Nov. 4, 1886, two years before Escondido incorporated into a city, Amasa Lindsay, a Kansas City newspaperman hired by the Land & Town Co., opened the Escondido Times, a weekly broadsheet filled with front-page ads.

If an ambitious city was going to grow, it needed a newspaper to trumpet the physical, spiritual and financial virtues of moving to Escondido.

Five years later, the Advocate, a weekly dedicated to populist agrarian politics, printed its first edition.

One of the recurring issues of the time was secession from San Diego County and the formation of Palomar County, a reflection of North County’s traditional desire for independence from the dominant city for which the county is named.

For 19 years, the two Escondido weeklies competed for readers and advertisers, the one advancing the cause of business, the other of farmers.

In 1909, a group of investors bought both papers and the name, which to this day makes my heart shift position, was born: the Times-Advocate.

In 1918, the T-A went daily, pumping out papers for three-quarters of a century. A succession of publishers and editors — Percy Evans, Fred Speers, Ron Kenney, Carlton Appleby, John Armstrong, Will Corbin, Rich Petersen — dedicated themselves to making the T-A the glue that held inland North County together as a distinct place in the world.

Meanwhile, over on the

North County coast, the Oceanside Herald had made its debut shortly after incorporation in 1888. In 1891, the weekly changed its name to the more dashing (and menacing) Blade.

Publisher Paul Beck joined his brother to buy the Blade in the late ’20s and quickly merged the Blade with the local weekly Tribune to form North County’s second daily, the Blade-Tribune.

As with the inland T-A, it’s hard to overstate the influence the Blade had on coastal life. In 1954, Thomas Braden, a major figure on the political stage who could go on to host CNN’s “Crossfire,” wielded the Blade for 13 years as its owner-publisher. Howard Publications bought the Blade in 1967 and installed arguably North County journalism’s most unforgettable character at the helm. The young, brash Tom Missett modernized operations and, with his brother Bill as editor, pushed the battle-ready Blade into Fallbrook and San Marcos, muscling into the T-A’s territory.

In 1989, Oceanside’s daily merged with the weekly Citizen and the name Blade-Citizen

was first printed on the masthead.

When I reported for work at the Times-Advocate in 1986, six newspapers — the T-A, the Blade, the Union, the Tribune, the Los Angeles Times’ San Diego edition and the Vista Press — competed for readers and advertisers in the heart of North County. No politician, no council or school board, no two-headed snake was safe from a reporter’s questions.

That exhilarating full-court press ended with the grim reality of recession of the early ’90s.

The Union and the Tribune merged in 1992 to form the Union-Tribune; the Vista Press folded; the Los Angeles Times, tired of losing money in San Diego, retreated to Orange County; and in 1995, the Tribune Co. of Chicago, owner of the T-A, sold to Blade-Citizen owner Howard Publications, a sale that resulted in the North County Times, a nod to Escondido’s ancestral paper.

For the past 17 years, the Times and the Union-Tribune have fought the good fight, one on one. Directed by publisher Dick High and editor Kent Davy, the Times flooded North County with reporters filing multiple stories a day. The U-T offered the resources of a metro paper with more regional coverage.

Last year, U-T San Diego Publisher Doug Manchester and CEO John Lynch bought the Union-Tribune from Platinum Equity, a company that two years earlier had purchased the U-T, ending the Copley family’s 81-year stewardship.

Manchester, an entrepreneurial businessman in the tradition of Spreckels, Scripps and Ira Copley, saw an opportunity to buy the North County Times and seized it.

•••

Mergers are never easy. Those of us who have been through them, as I have as a T-A editor, know there’s no honeymoon. It’s hard work blending cultures that have fought each other for more than a century, particularly when one has deep ties to the big city to the south and the other to independent towns and country to the north.

It’s a counterintuitive thought but it strikes me as true: With just one daily newspaper in the North County newsracks, San Diego suddenly feels like a smaller, more concentrated place. At the same time, this newspaper’s duty to dig in and report the news is even larger.

If Gatewood’s faithful mirror is to survive, if this last-ditch union of daily print journalism is to endure, the choice is simple and difficult.

San Diego, the whole county, is going to have to come together in these printed pages.

It’s a hard job but there’s no one else left to do it.

U-T San Diego owes it to the omnipresent ink-stained ghosts of the past to pull it off.